Truck (20 page)

The grille on the L-180 isn't perfect—there's a fair amount of rust around the headlights, which someone has repaired with tin and rivets—but it's in better shape than the one on my truck. Right off the bat I notice a slotted hole lowdown and dead center and recognize it as the insertion point for a crank starter. In the absence of battery power, you just stuck the crank in there and turned the engine over until it caught—or backfired and broke your elbow. The old-timers will tell you these stories. One of the horizontal bars is badly warped, and one is straight. The good news? It's the same story on my truck, so we'll use one straight bar from each.

Before we can pull the grille, we have to pull a homemade brush guard. It's fairly roughly done, cobbled together out of welded quarter-inch steel and bolted to the bumper. We're getting ready to loosen the bolts when I notice a gap missing from the center of the guard. It's a
crude cut, punched through with a blowtorch and left rough. The serrated path of the flame is still visible. But what makes us smile is that it's centered right over the starter crank aperture. We stand there a minute and enjoy the idea of it. The guy working all afternoon, welding the whole works together, drilling the bolt holes, grunting it into place, snugging all the bolts down, and then—in that signature moment of male-ness—taking two steps back to pause and admire what he has wrought. It's the same when we finish shoveling the driveway, or stacking wood, or folding a dish towel. But in this case he basked there for a minute, and then it slowly dawned on him that he had blocked off the aperture for the starter crank. You can just see him in your mind's eye, shaking his head and going for the torch.

On the other hand, maybe he didn't discover his mistake until the first time he tried to start the truck. Again, you can see him standing there as his jaw loosens and drops into the
aaacch!
position, then he throws down the crank and spins on his heel.

Either version, we get a kick out of it.

By the time we get everything detached and laid out on the concrete apron, the mercury vapor light over the shop has come on and the crickets are commencing. By chance, I read a Stanley Kunitz poem over lunch in which he had a line about crickets
trilling/underfoot
and it's nice to recall it now. Mark and I shoot the breeze easy for a while, and then I drive on home.

Later that night the cops get into a car chase that ends in our county when the pursued driver crashes his Corvette into a tree. The tree is barely scuffed, but the nose of that car is in pieces all around our feet, and I am thinking,
Son, what you need here is one of them International mustache grilles.
What is to become of a country that trades steel for fiberglass? In a bit of delicious irony, the man credited for recommending Corvette go the fiberglass route was Raymond Loewy.

 

I get back over to Mark's place early the next morning. I prop the grille up against the shop and start drilling out the rivets holding the tin patches in place. The ridge formed by the edges of the tin overlay were smoothed
over with body filler, long since cracked. When the last rivet is drilled and I pull the tin free, I find that once the filler cracked, the potential space between the tin and original body became a moisture trap, and the rust is more advanced behind the patch than it would have been if left to open air. Even so, the deterioration is nowhere near advanced as that on my truck.

The headlights are still in their sockets, so I loosen the screws and pop the retaining ring, and when the sealed beam comes out in my hands, the paint behind it is factory new. Protected by the housing, it remains as Chesapeake Gray and velvety to the touch as when it sat for sale out front of one of Raymond Loewy's freshly streamlined dealerships. Mark is getting set up to sandblast my truck's tire rims, but he needs silica for the blaster, so we make a Farm & Fleet run. It doesn't take two of us, but this is hardly the point. We pick up primer, black paint, rubber gloves, the silica, and two packs each of peanut M&Ms and Reese's Pieces. On the way home we pass a beautiful woman walking down the service road. I twist half out of my seat for a look. Then I look back at Mark. He's grinning. “A married man,” he says, “learns to turn his eyes and not his head.”

It's a good afternoon then, him blasting, me scrubbing. It takes a long time to do the grille. I have to work the pad in and out and up and down the vertical slots like I'm flossing the iron teeth of some robot. Now and then the pad catches an edge and the drill kicks back violently. When I finish, I take the sanding pad to the truck bed. So much time has passed since it was sandblasted that you can tell where we grabbed it to move it, because our salty handprints are revealed as rusty petroglyphs on the steel. It doesn't take much to touch them up, just a quick buff. Up above the retaining wall and behind a row of hostas, Kathleen has come out and is painting the house trim. She and Mark were able to buy this place on the cheap because the previous owners had rendered it unlivable. Among other things there was an abundance of cats, and drunken revelers had pissed down the basement steps. They've poured sweat equity into the place and now it's shaping up, but there's still a ways to go. I wonder how my sister feels about me roping Mark into this project, sucking up so much of his time. But I guess mostly we just
enjoy the chance to spend some time together. I enjoy grown-up banter with my sister, because, thanks to the permanence of certain memories, I am always surprised that the little blond toddler who was paddling around in footie pajamas when I left for college has become this woman. Sidrock is in his crib beside her, chewing on an oak leaf and drooling on his toys. Mark and Kathleen were married in one of those speedy Las Vegas wedding chapels. “Same one as Demi Moore,” Kathleen told me. They bought the videotape, and I watched it once. Kathleen was radiant and Mark stood back in a tux, his fingers twitching as though they were unused to hanging empty.

 

Despite my backsliding in the areas of tears and rage, it is my conviction that over the past several decades, the repression of feelings has been undervalued. After a lifetime of being harangued to
let it all out,
I am heartened by recent studies indicating the people who repress their emotions have a higher heart attack survival rate than people who are overtly emotional. I know people who are
constantly
“letting it all out,” and their spirits remain consistently unimproved. I humbly submit that the world could do with a little more keeping it in. Sometimes caring people tell me I am repressing my anger. My chosen response is to meet their gaze intently, let one eye drift slowly inward, and reply: “
Yes. I. Am.”

And yet, compared to Mark, I am Richard Simmons. Mark is an eighth-level Zen master of stoicism. His philosophy can be distilled to three words: “Walk it off.” He uses it in every context. Hit your head on the hood? “Walk it off.” Burn your hand on the exhaust? “Walk it off.” Wife left you for the Schwan's man? “Walk it off.”

He says it all the time. He says it when Kathleen spills the paint. He says it when Sidrock raps himself in the head with his bottle. He says it when he hears one of his coworkers complaining about overtime.

He means it.

It works. Although to be fair, Sidrock isn't walking yet.

 

With the school year starting up again, Anneliese isn't able to wander up as often and stay as long as she has during the summer. We've also questioned lately whether we are cut out for some more standard long-term living arrangement. There are no histrionics, just long talks and quiet thinking that leaves us, as Anneliese put it, with “butterflies, buttermilk, and vinegar” in the gut.

We've been short of rain, and the garden has waned some again, but I manage to put away a few things for the winter. Mom gave me a big clutch of thyme and the tomatoes are coming in decent now, so I get out my foil roasting pans to make paste and stock the way I read in
Think Like a Chef
. I line the pans with sprigs of thyme, then pack in the halved tomatoes and a handful of unshucked garlic cloves, sprinkle in some sea salt and fresh ground pepper, drizzle on the olive oil, then slide the whole works in the oven to break down and mingle.

In between ladling off the tomato stock, I pack up some chicken breasts. First I lay out rectangles of tin foil and make a little bed of thyme in each. I settle the breast on the thyme and pack it with diced onions. I pulled the onions from the garden this morning and they are frankly sad, about the size of Ping-Pong balls, but they are my onions, and I will use them. Before I seal the foil, I add some soy sauce. After four breasts, I run out of onions and switch to making lemon chicken. The lemon balm has come on well, so I use the fattest leaves to line the foil. Then after topping the breast with a lemon slice, I wrap the whole works in leaves. Add salt, pepper, olive oil, and some capers, and seal the foil. I put all the breasts on a flat pan in the freezer. Later when they are frozen, I will vacuum pack them with my sealer, the one that makes the little farty engine noise when you push the button, As Seen on TV! Before sealing, I like to hold my index finger up and declare in a tone of wonder, “Just one touch!” If you try to seal the packages before they're frozen, the juice gets sucked out of the tinfoil. It's a baroque, work-making way to go about things, I guess, but it beats TV dinners, and you feel good to be stowing some things away against the coming winter.

When Anneliese calls and says she and Amy can run up for supper, I retrieve three of the packets from the freezer, where they've only half-frozen. Later while we bump around the kitchen rattling dishes and
making fresh salad as the chicken bakes, it's Greg Brown on the CD player again, singing, “
where the kitchen is happy, love has a chance…”
and we make a note of it.

 

August has always been my month of resolutions. Forget January and the artificial premise of the New Year, it seems always to be August when I resolve that next year I will pare down, clear the calendar, and focus on doing a few simple things and doing them fully. This year I find myself entertaining visions of a one-room shack with one table, one chair, one skillet, one potbellied stove, and a wood-splitter's ax sunk at an angle in the doorjamb. Menu: mainly biscuits and bacon. Occasionally, just to test my mettle, squirrel. For dessert, apple pan dowdy. Certainly a measure of this reactionary navel-noodling can be attributed to the standard metaphorical casting of autumn as the season when winter's deathly breath first fogs your rose-colored glasses, but on a more fundamental level I think it has to do with the reaping of gardens and good intentions, both of which tend to come in well below spring's predictions.

I
was raised by strong women. Of course they could only do so much. I use the term raised in the perpetual sense, because the work continues. There is my mother, of course, sentenced to nature's most blessed curse, in which the female is expected to give of her body and blood in the rearing of a creature bound to bring trouble on the house. Not to mention the heart. A child is prayer and worry wrapped in a blanket. Tax deductible, yes, but oh, the hidden costs. You might describe my mom as the valedictorian homecoming queen who wound up a God-fearing homemade granola–slinging Florence Nightingale in a maxiskirt and construction boots stuck on a cow farm. Over the years she has taken responsibility for the care and feeding of legions of children—some conceived, some adopted, some fostered, some delivered by the county for the weekend, others for a lifetime. She is slight of build, and (touse her phrase)
just mortified
by public attention(thus I write of her in the broadest terms), but I have watched three firefighters rush to her with an unconscious baby and then enclose her in a semicircle of hulking apprehension while she calmly gets the kid breathing again. I have also seen her up to her elbow in the rear end of a sheep and giving rescue breaths to a newborn Holstein calf. (Mind you, not simultaneously.) For forty years she has raised a constantly fluctuating passel of tots, drawing on her wits, fifty-pound bags of oatmeal, and a fistful of coupons the size of a bad UNO hand. There were undoubtedly sleepless nights, but she never betrayed them.

For balance, I should also tell you she has imparted certain inefficiencies and weirdness, including an inability to focus in the midterm (short-term emergencies—
like a laser;
long-term dedication to principle and task—
can do;
finish one load of clothes without being distracted by a mildewed
Reader's Digest,
the song of a wren, or the knowledge that the mail has arrived—
not so much
); a propensity for impromptu flop sweats (a familywide trait—my aunt Pam holds several world records); and a habit of flicking her hands against her legs when she is discomfited. Both my brother John and I have inherited versions of this last tic, effectively killing our chances of achieving success in the world of high-stakes poker, international espionage, or, for that matter, dentistry.

 

My Grandma Peterson lived in fourteen different homes before she was eighteen. Then, after a brief marriage that didn't work out, she moved to a different town and married my grandfather. Not counting half a year spent living in motels, Grandpa moved her in and out of another twelve homes. Over this time she raised five children of her own and took in another twenty-eight foster children. She did her baking with a. 22 rifle at hand and was known to step away from the stove to snipe feral cats and once an incautious woodchuck. My deerslaying uncle used to wax a bit windy about his abilities as a marksman until the day Grandma took up arms out behind the barn and schooled him in a manner he will to this day not discuss, although one hopes the perforated targets have been retained as evidence. In my favorite snapshot of her, she is leaning over Dad's woodpile, detonating my brother's five-foot-long black powder muzzleloader. The air is hung with smoke and powder sparks are still arcing downward. I should add that she was scrupulously honest, deeply compassionate, and jumped rope until the age of at least seventy-two.

Grandma Perry burned at least one pack of Carltons a day, and on tough days knocked back a martini before supper. I recall her sticking her wadded Clark's Teaberry gum on the plasticine of the cigarette pack before lighting up, and my brother recently reminded me of the way she held the handle of her fishing reel between her thumb and third finger so as to free up the index and middle finger for the ever-present heater. Sawed off and short-tempered, she favored sayings like “well hell-up-
a-tree” and “that woman could knock a bulldog off a gut-wagon,” and she once declared that a certain parsimonious fellow was “tighter than a gnat's ass around a rain barrel,” but the phrase she held closest to her heart still remains on the masthead of the local humane association she helped found: “
a voice for those who cannot speak
.” She was fierce on behalf of animals, from picking up local strays in her orange Duster to serving as president of the state humane society. She had a way with human strays as well. The animal shelter employed its fair share of down-and-outers, and Grandma knew her way to the bail window of the county jail. I was present more than once when someone knocked on the door to reimburse her for covering their bond. She wrote heartfelt poetry, admired Albert Schweitzer, and spent her early married life alone, raising my father on her own with Grandpa gone to the shores of Iwo Jima.

Remaining within the family tree, there is my tiny aunt Sal, so bowlegged she couldn't catch a pig in an alley, but sharp enough to leave the smoothest horse traders this side of the South Dakota Hippodrome weeping over their slit pockets. Aunt Mabel, eighty years old and currently charging off to every cultural event within a fifty-mile radius of Spooner, Wisconsin, usually with a carload of restless contemporaries. Aunt Meg, who took time out between hairstyling and running her own café to drive an eighteen-wheeler, hauling corn syrup and refrigerated goods across the country behind a gigantic black Freightliner. Aunt Annie, who got all the cows milked before heading to the hospital where she delivered baby number three directly upon arrival.

 

Somewhere around last June or so, I was talking to Anneliese about how beautifully it seemed to be going with us, and she said she would be reserving her judgment until six months passed. That was a rolled-up newspaper to the snoot. Counting from our first date in mid-April, we have a month and a half to go. Anneliese wrote me a note recently saying she liked “how we work—deeply and easily.” I, in turn, told her from the bottom of my heart that I was grateful for her “reasonableness.” This is the complimentary equivalent of a vacuum cleaner for Christmas. And yet she confirms that reasonableness by consistently
giving me do-overs in the wake of such dumbfounding tone deafness.

It hasn't been a complete skate. There are things. Little pop-up ghosts of the past, hints of disagreement over where we might live if we decide to make it official, our continued reasonable doubts about how either of us will manage the shift from long-term independence to peaceful cohabitation. We both have a desire to get off the grid, more or less. Keep the power line, but supplement it with a windmill and a few solar panels. Each of us hankers for a real garden and those chickens. Recently we took a ride to look at some land near where Anneliese was raised. We stood there under a gray sky, and Anneliese talked about the beauty of the place. She was right. It was beautiful. But when I stood there, I didn't feel a thing. Later I drove her a short way out of my village to another patch of land. Same situation, reversed. She couldn't feel what I felt. On the drive home I got grumpy and quiet and couldn't look her in the eye. We sat quietly for a long while after. Anneliese said she felt like the vinegar was back. Later, alone, I waited for the old hopelessness to return. It did not. Perhaps it was her clear blue eyes. Having failed at this time and time again, I hesitate to say, but I have never felt so placid.

I hope I'm right. Love is a contact sport of the heart. You can't take the hits like you used to.

 

Beyond blood, I was schooled in powerful womanhood by the dignified Charlotte Carlson, who came to Chippewa County in a buckboard and lived to see the space shuttle launch. When my parents bought her farm, she was not bitter but rather became my mother's best friend and our surrogate grandmother. From her I carry an affection for potato lefse and sugar cookies and good whole wheat flatbread spread thickly with butter. There was Vernetta, the next-door neighbor who fed her hay crews thrice between noon and five o'clock, unloading hay wagons in between. Nelda, the Wyoming rancher's wife who always wore a dress but could take out a prairie dog at two hundred yards (discounting the time she miscalculated while using her pickup truck hood as a rifle rest and put a straight crease through the sheet metal). Ramona, from the farm across the forty, who babysat us when I was young. She held my brother
headfirst in the sink when I knocked him off the concrete steps with the screen door and blood poured from his brow. Thirty years later a woman visiting from somewhere else met Ramona and said, That Perry boy writes beautifully, and Ramona said, Well, that ain't the way he
talks
.

In 1984, I was admitted to the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire School of Nursing and spent the next three years immersed in a world that was 3.5 percent men. To say my female classmates were my intellectual equals or better is neither conjecture nor condescension—it was a fact verified weekly in the form of coded test results posted on a wooden door. I consistently ran my finger down to the lower middle before locating my secret number. This had a way of rendering gender issues moot. My instructors were by and large fiercely intelligent vanguard feminists, eager to eradicate chauvinism in all its forms, although they didn't seem to mind asking me to help lift heavy patients, or strip to my shorts when it was time to demonstrate physical assessment or intramuscular injections. At the time, I got a little righteous about this contradiction. I have since come to understand blind spots are universal, and less a sign of inconsistency than proof of humanity. I propose this in part because I could sure use the wiggle room.

 

Sometimes when I am snuffling along nurturing my vision of Anneliese as the simple farmgirl of my cornball dreams, I will attempt to join her in the company of certain women and run face-first into an energy shield that causes me to lumber backward like the bull who lays his dumb wet nose on the electrified fence. I tend to put my faith in physics over mystery, but for all the farmwives and feminists and well-armed grandmas in my life, there have been a small convention of others who have modeled more ineffable powers. Galinda, the neighbor up the road who, in the process of allegedly unruffling my field, hovered her palm about a half inch above my right scapula and said, “I feel a lot of heat
here.
” I had been having spasms there for a month since getting hit in a football game, but there was no mark or bruise, and I hadn't said a word to Galinda. I remember thinking,
Well now
. There is Laurie, a woman who—I don't know any other way to put it—glows with invisible light.
With her shawls and sculpture work and barefootedness, she is the personification of an earth mother, but I have seen her rise up and put down a strong man while the rest of us were content to avoid eye contact and whisper behind our hands. Recently she told me she believes we are all energy created by a purposeful magnetism and that the catalyst is love. This may explain the invisible light. The first time Anneliese and Laurie met, they hugged, and then later each sought me out separately to remark on the other's aura.

Finally, there is my cousin Alice, a painter and poet and stained-glass glazier, who claims certain extrasensory powers and has been known to stumble over force fields. She says there are times when she is led by birds. I am leery of such talk and would be dismissive, except that Alice once outbid a stranger to buy back her deceased uncle's 1950 Dodge pickup at auction, the sole reason being that she hates to cry, and I am pleased by the idea of psychic plus stoic. Alice once told me artistry does not reside in motivation but rather stems from showing up, with the intent to be honest. When I meet a dreamer with calluses I try to shut up and listen. And lest everything sound too glorious, I am also remembering Cerise, who taught me that a strong woman can wind up battered in ways no weak man ever would.

 

Around the middle of the month I get a chance to work on the truck again. As I'm getting into the car I stop at one of the raised beds and pick a green pepper, a cucumber, and some cherry tomatoes. The garden remains pretty much a flop (after a long dry spell we're getting rain today), but even the most middling return on my efforts is rewarded when I bite into that pepper. Eating it like an apple as I drive, I marvel as always at the sweet watery crunch, one of my favorite “clean” flavors, reminiscent as it is of fallen rain. Conversely, I find that when cooked, green peppers become snotty and overbearing, capable of dominating and ruining the spaghetti sauce.

The radiator is fixed, and I have it in the backseat of my car. After I unload it and Mark inspects it, we start working on the fenders. Mark will be able to cut and transfer patches from one of the cannibalized
fenders. For a few of the smaller holes outside the range of the patches, Mark has me hold a flat chunk of copper on the underside of the fender while he uses the welder to fill the hole with a molten bead. The bead doesn't cling to the copper. Later I go back and knock the dome off the bead with a grinder, then go back over it again to sand the bead flat. You're left with a smooth surface and a small line of suture where the fresh bead and old steel meet. When we've finished filling holes, I take a wire brush to the inside of the fenders. After I've scuffed away all the loose flakes and spurs of oxidized steel, I brush the entire surface with rust converter. It goes on foamy white, like spilled milk. As it soaks into the surface, the rust takes on a bluish tinge. Several hours later what was once rusty looks oily and dark, and the rust is inert.

The bottom edges of the fenders (including the ones we robbed off the junker) are badly eaten with rust. We toy with several options—patching the holes, welding a steel strip around the base of each fender—but finally Mark suggests he simply trim them back an inch or so. It seems like a simple enough approach, and the International fenders of the day hung like big steel drapes anyway, so I give him the go-ahead. Once again the purists weep, although I have been reading more about Raymond Loewy, and one of his pet phrases was “areas of examination”—that is to say, what can be tweaked to favorable effect? Loewy was famous for cutting chunks off his Cadillacs and BMWs to reconfigure their lines in a manner he found more pleasing, and I believe Mark is up to the task.